hot-potatoes | Thomas' Work Space

LRC Faculty Showcase: Enhancing reading fluency in Spanish through Online Courses

2014/01/24 plagwitz Leave a comment

The videos of the presentation by Maria Mahaffey, Emily Kristoff and Shaun Stone on SPAN2200, using Hot Potatoes exercises in Moodle, and the ensuing discussion, are available on the intranet:
PowerPoint screencast with audio: “S:\CLAS\LCS\MYDEPT\mahaffey\span2200\showcase\SLP_2014_PowerPoint.wmv” (size: 130MB).
Video with presenter and PowerPoint on projector: “S:\CLAS\LCS\MYDEPT\mahaffey\span2200\showcase\showcase-SLP-2014.mp4” (size:410MB).

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-languages, faculty-showcases, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Practice&Demos, Reading, Screencasts, Spanish, Videos, workshops Tags: hot-potatoes, moodle

Trying to reduce Attempt abandoned in Hot Potato Hot Pot Moodle quizzes

2013/12/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

The Hot Potatoes quiz activity per se does not seem to have a submit button, since it is auto-grading, per question.
. When the quiz is completed, the string in ExerciseCompleted (usually: “You have complete the exercise” )appears in a modal dialogue and on top.
Before Exercise is complete, the instructions now remain, since I have turned off ShowCompleteSoFar:
One could make ExerciseCompleted much more visible (like with ShowCompleteSoFar permanently in a Hot Potatoe inhstallation), if looking out for this message would help the students not abandoning the quiz early:

Categories: assessments, e-learning, service-is-configuring-learning-tools Tags: hot-potatoes, javascript, moodle, quizzes

How to get rid of “Questions completed” feedback in Hot Potatoes quizzes

2013/12/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

If you dig into the JavaScript in the HTML, looking for the default feedback t4ext (“Questions completed so far”), you see (as I have done here manually; this could be relatively easily done also for an entire batch of course quizzes with a global replacement) that you turn this option off:
1. var CompletedSoFar = ‘Questions completed so far: ‘;
2. var ShowCompletedSoFar = false;
But that does not get rid of the #/# being displayed.
There is an option to get rid of the Feedback text:
If I read the options correctly, there is no such setting (we tried the obvious suspects here):

function CheckQuestionsCompleted(){
    // trp: trying to disable showing to student QuestionsCompleted 
// (entire function  even if somebody changes the variable ShowCompletedSoFar) 
    // if i understand correctly, what users really do not want to show 
// is a misleading completed correctly for completed 
// (which leads to students not know that they have finished?) - \
// is there no better way? 
    // was: if (ShowCompletedSoFar == false )){return '';} 
// trp: cannot find a gui to set ShowCompletedSoFar  to false
    var QsCompleted = 0;
    for (var QNum=0; QNum<State.length; QNum++){         if (State[QNum] != null){             if (State[QNum][0] &gt;= 0){
                QsCompleted++;
            }
        }
    }
//Fixes for 6.2.2.2
    if (QsCompleted >= QArray.length){
        return ExerciseCompleted;
    }
    else{
        return ''; // trp: CompletedSoFar + ' ' + QsCompleted + '/' + QArray.length + '.';
    }
}

Since you can edit the sourcefiles of a HotPotatoes installation, you can turn it also off for a machine permanently:
If this variable is there in the underlying code, shouldn’t there be also an option in the GUI (not necessarily, maybe was never implemented – or maybe I just have not found it…).
For what the output will look like, see here.